Advertisers and marketers are often confronted with a wide range of considerations when developing an advertising or marketing campaign. Some characteristics of an advertisement, such as layout and content, may influence the type or quality of the responses that are generated from exposure of the advertisement to a particular environment. An approach is described herein, which utilizes multivariate testing as a tool for directing the development of advertisements that are optimized for a particular response. As one example, a text advertisement for an Internet webpage is optimized utilizing the multivariate testing approach. Other examples are presented whereby multivariate testing is applied across different media formats.